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You have to remember that high profile accounts get 10000x the number of abuse-reports than a normal account - nearly all bogus. The normal automated moderation
by q1w2 5y ago
You have to remember that high profile accounts get 10000x the number of abuse-reports than a normal account - nearly all bogus. The normal automated moderation functions simply do not work.
Many users will simply mash the "report abuse" button if they see a politician they don't like, or a sports player for an opposing team.
If the normal rules applied identically to everyone, all high profile accounts would simply be inactive in perpetuity.
Maybe a better system would penalize reporters that are found to have reported content that do NOT violent content policies?
- otterley 5y agoNobody is complaining that Facebook has exceptions for automatically suspending accounts just because people are misreporting them as abusive. The issue is, and has always been, exceptions to the content-based rules which are supposed to apply equally to everyone.
- nindalf 5y agoSo if hundreds of people reported the content posted by a celebrity, or if a classifier misfired on the content posted by a celebrity, there shouldn’t be any protection for the content?
- otterley 5y agoThe content should be evaluated according to the same set of the rules that apply to everyone else. If the content classification rules are properly implemented, no amount of button-smashing should result in a different outcome.
- lavabiopsy 5y agoIf you know how to build a bug-free system with content classification rules that are properly implemented for 2 billion people in every conceivable circumstance, I think Facebook (or any other big social media company) would pay you a lot of money to implement that. Like, an unbelievably large sum of money.
- lmm 5y agoThat's beside the point. If your classification system isn't good enough to use on celebrities, it's not good enough to use on regular people either - bans are just as annoying for them, even if they have less voice to complain.
- lavabiopsy 5y agoI'm not sure what the point here is other than that bans are annoying? Also, I don't think it was suggested to use a classification system with no bans?
- lmm 5y agoPeople aren't objecting to the fact that the rules misclassify people sometimes. They're objecting to the two-tier system that lets celebrities avoid bans but doesn't let regular users do so.
- lavabiopsy 5y agoI think you may have missed something in the post chain? Those are both the same thing in this context.
- otterley 5y agoI’m not sure that this is a problem that can be solved solely through software and automation. It’s a business problem. Automation is a means to solve this problem - and the one Facebook uses to save money and operate at scale - but when it comes to making content judgments, people are often better than machines at doing it. “Report” buttons can be an input into the mechanism, but they need not be authoritative. The problem for Facebook is that adding people is going to be expensive and hurt their bottom line. So they are likely incented to treat these disparities as collateral damage on the road to ever-increasing profits.
- lavabiopsy 5y ago
- frumper 5y agoA person spending a minute looking at something that has garnered a high number of reports is reasonable instead of just ignoring reports because it's a celebrity. It doesn't have to be automated. Edge cases can be expensive
- danudey 5y agoThis is exactly the solution. IF tons of people are reporting Steve Newscaster because he posted a status about how his team won, then he shouldn't become immune to criticism, those people should lose the privilege of having their voice heard. Just send them a little message saying "Hey, you've falsely reported a bunch of posts/accounts lately, so we're restricting your ability to report content for 30 days." and if they keep doing it, make it permanent.
- stickfigure 5y agoThat might not work. In the eternal September of Facebook there may always be enough new accounts to continuously file false reports against high profile accounts.
- greenyoda 5y agoHN has addressed this problem by not granting new users flagging privileges - you need a certain karma threshold to flag an article or comment. And flagging/vouching privileges can be removed for HN users who abuse them.
- anigbrowl 5y agoYeah but you can just buy warmed-up verified accounts on SEO marketplaces, often several years old and patiently curated to be blandly inoffensive and ready to be turned into whatever you need.
- greenyoda 5y agoStill, having to do that greatly reduces the problem. The average person who wants to censor a politician they hate isn't going to spend money to buy an account. Another potential mitigation might be to put a limit on the number of posts that a single user can flag in a day. At some point, the cost of large-scale content manipulation could be made to exceed the expected gains. It may even be profitable for Facebook to crack down on this. Every celebrity post that gets illegitimately taken down has potential for showing ads to millions of people.
- cratermoon 5y ago> high profile accounts get 10000x the number of abuse-reports Has anyone considered the possibility that this is a signal from the non-elites that something is wrong? That ignoring this "mass downvote" is the essence of the structural elitism?
- vasco 5y agoPopular users get lots of eyeballs on their content. If an average post will get 1 report per 10k views, a popular post with 10m views will get 1000 reports. It doesn't have to have a deeper meaning.
- paulmd 5y agowell, in that case, why not make the metric reports-per-view? if you make the metric a rate then it doesn't matter whether it gets 10k views or 10m views, the question becomes "what % of viewers thought this was worth a report". The rate can still be (and probably is) higher for high-visibility accounts of course but in the example you gave the rate of reports is the same and the problem is using a naive "10 reports = ban" metric.
- reissbaker 5y agoBecause brigading exists.
- smsm42 5y agoBrigading is likely a detectable pattern with enough data. Sure, it'd be hard to distinguish between residents of some chan brigading their enemy and somebody being a target of public shaming due to cancel campaign, but in my eyes it's a feature.
- smsm42 5y agoFB knows how many eyeballs there was. Their whole business is counting eyeballs. So they can easily teach whatever robot they use to take eyeball counts into account, and give more weight to "report per view" than to "absolute number of reports".
- YossarianFrPrez 5y agoIn addition, maybe a better system would also increase the effort needed to file a report. Calling in and leaving a voicemail message in response to specific questions, for example.
- ErikVandeWater 5y ago> You have to remember that high profile accounts get 10000x the number of abuse-reports than a normal account - nearly all bogus. The normal automated moderation functions simply do not work. You would think with the literal legion of geniuses Facebook has they would have a smarter way of handling reports than simply counting them and taking down content that receives over X reports.
- camdat 5y agoThey do. In the linked article it discusses high-risk accounts requiring less reports to take down a post, down to as little as one.
- ErikVandeWater 5y agoI was being sarcastic.
- Talanes 5y ago>Maybe a better system would penalize reporters that are found to have reported content that do NOT violent content policies? This might work if the response to a report wasn't so arbitrary. I've been given bans for using heated language, yet had comments that were just as heated AND making direct threats at people marked as not violating any rules when I made the report.